Noob School - Yac.com: Revolutionizing Remote Communication with COO Jordan Walker

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Dive into the story behind Yac.com's revolutionary asynchronous audio messaging platform and their latest venture, UseBacktrack.com. Gain exclusive insights into how Yac.com and UseBacktrack.com are transforming team collaboration and streamlining remote work processes. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting your journey, this episode is packed with valuable insights into the future of communication technology.Get your sales in rhythm with The Sterling Method: https://SterlingSales.co I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL#SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

New School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. John Sterling here, and I've got a good friend, relatively new friend, Jordan Walker here with me today. Jordan is relatively new to Greenville, moved up here from Florida. We're thankful for that, by the way. And he and his partner have a wonderful new company called yak.com, y-a-k.com. Thanks for being here today. Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm really pumped to talk and get this going.

I know you are. That's great. Well, let's back up. Let's don't get to the yak quite yet. Yeah, yeah. Where did you grow up? Well, so I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but I moved down to Florida to Jacksonville, Florida, when I was pretty young and grew up there. So, played a lot of basketball there. Yeah. A lot of track and field.

But, yeah, it was good. Good old Jacks near the beach. What were your track and field events? So it's funny. When I was in high school, I was just a jumper. So I did long jump and high jumping. That's in the college what I initially got recruited for. When I got to college, my coach goes, hey, you're actually pretty athletic. You're kind of fast.

You can actually do a lot. So before you knew it, before I knew it, I ended up doing the decathlon actually. So the decathlon is the 10 events over two days. So someone like me, I learned how to pull vault, throw a javelin, throw a shot put, hurdle, run the mile, all these sort of events. And I still hate the mile to this day, but I'm really grateful for my time doing track. It taught me so much, and it was a blast, and I got to travel all over the place for doing it. What college was that? That was the University of North Florida.

North Florida. Yes. Is that near Jacksonville? It's in Jacksonville, actually. So coming out of high school, I had the option to go play basketball and move far away, but I'd take on student loans in doing so. Or I could go D1 and track, stay close to my family and friends, and then I have school paid for. Because I kind of had to figure out school for myself. And I knew in hoops, I knew that I don't think I would.

was good enough to make it to the league, right? I think it's everybody's dream, but I had that honest conversation with myself. And I was like, well, I don't want to graduate in four years going to a random school, being far away from everybody and being stuck all these student loans. So I ended up, you know, opting for the track route. And I'm really glad I did. You know, my life has worked out pretty awesome the way it has so far. Yeah, that's a good decision.

Yeah. Good decision. Now, you say you learned a lot from track. Tell us a lesson or two that you learned from all that work. Yeah. I mean, I think just the sheer amount of, work in the volume it takes to really like hone your craft and like be great at something and then to you know with the way a lot of track meets work is you can run as independent athlete and so from time to

time in these meets like these pro athletes these guys who are running the Olympic sponsor my Nike all that would do the same sort of events as us and just seeing the caliber of like a high level college person to like a true Olympian it's just so vast and through that my eyes really opened up I'm like okay that is you know, kind of even be on track. That is just top tier, a person who's the best of the best at their craft. And that really inspired me. You know, I looked up to a lot of those guys.

And so I said, okay, well, whatever I'm going to do, I want to be that. I want to just be so unbelievably better than everybody else and so good at what I do. Yeah. That it's really hard not to notice. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting point.

Very interesting point because I believe, and I've talked about this before, you know, it just robs me the wrong way when I see grown people, adults, pickling men, just sporting somebody else's jersey. I've always thought that too. I mean, it's like, what about you? Yeah. What about you?

You're talking about Kretzky or Jordan or, you know, these people. What about you? What can you be the best? Yeah, I've always thought that too. Yeah. I've always thought that too. See, all over the place. Yeah, funny story about that.

So one time I got roasted for it. So the only jersey I wear, I have a buddy who plays in the NBA. He's like one of my closest friends who grew up together. So I'll wear his jersey. And one time I was wearing his jersey and somebody caught me on it. They're like, oh, you know, what do you do and wearing another man's name on your shirt? I was like, well, turns out he's actually one of my best friends. I might have a little break to the rule there.

But yeah, I totally agree with you. I'm like, what do you, go make a name for yourself. Yeah, and as much as it irks me a little bit, more importantly, I think the message is your message, which is, I'm not going to be an Olympian track person, right? I recognize that. but what can I be that level of great in? Yeah, exactly. How far do I have to make the niche small to be great? Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

I think a lot of people have aspirations, especially in sports aspirations for I'm going to go to the league, I'm going to become a pro athlete, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. And I think a lot of people don't have the honest conversations with themselves around realistically, like how good those people are, how good they need to be where they're at, you know, and everything just kind of goes into it. you know, one of my buddies is in the league now, but I got a kind of first-hand seat from, like,

his recruiting process to Duke and now the NBA and stuff like that. And there's so much that also just has to go right in that process. You could be the best player in the world, but there's also so much that has to just go right in the process. So anyway, I say all to say, I think people just need to have an honest conversation about themselves. It's like, instead of being, you know, the best basketball player, how do you become the best entrepreneur, the best scientist, the best doctor,

the best lawyer, you know, whatever. it might be. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And one more basketball thing because I love basketball too. But, you know, Larry Bird is somebody that just always intrigues me because you see him and I still can't believe that he's like a top five of all-time player. Maybe top 10. I don't know, but he's one of the best ever. When you see him up against these people that are two inches taller and jump a foot higher. Yeah. And he just schools him. Yeah, he's good. And I'm a Celtics fan, too.

Like I said, I'm from Boston, so I'm a Celtics fan. How do you do it? Some guys just have it, I guess. You know, I think about that all the time. I still have on, it's funny, maybe I'll get roasted for this. I still have it on DVD, but some of the old games from all those guys back in the day. I'll go back and watch them, and they're just so fun, man. Like, they're playing style.

They can shoot lights out. It's cool. Yeah. The chief. Bird. Yep. Cornbread. Yeah.

Yeah, corporate was UNC Charlotte just up the road. That's right. Well, one thing I heard Byrd say about it, and then I'll stop talking basketball, but, you know, he said, coming from that little school in Indiana, of course, he was a cocky guy. Yeah. But he says he wasn't completely sure until he got to the NBA. And he says after two or three days, and he figured out, he's like, I'm going to get man-to-man defense.

Yeah. Because everyone's good. Yeah. Like when he was in college, he had three people chasing him around. Yeah. He's in zones. Yeah. He's like, I get to play.

He goes, I can be anybody man to man. Yeah. Which obviously he could. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's so true. It's so true. Like when, yeah, at that level, every single person is good. Like there's no, even, you know, I feel like people talk about it on Twitter a lot.

It's like, I could be the worst player in the NBA. It's like, no, you would get annihilated, 21 zero by the worst player in the NBA. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, pretty cool. Pretty cool, pretty cool college career, stayed close to home. Yep. And then what happened when you got out?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of it started actually still while in college. So I sort of knew in the back of my head, like I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. You know, my whole life, you know, my mom tells the story is very funny. I was like six years old, and I was doing whatever I could at the time. And baseball cards, Pokemon cards, whatever. But the highlight of my entrepreneurial journey when I was six is we lived near a golf course. So I rounded up my neighbor. neighbor, went down to the golf course. My mom didn't know for a while, but we collected

beer out of our parents' fridge. We went down to the golf course and we were selling it to golfers. Nice. They were buying beer from, you know, a little six-year-old. Austin and Jordan, and it was funny. One day my mom caught wind of it abruptly shut the operation down. She was not happy about that. And she was more confused why golfers were buying from us. But anyway, so I kind of had that, you know, in my head, and I think in my DNA. And then in college, fortunately enough, on the first day have classes. You know, I didn't know he was going to be my co-founder and best friend, but I met Hunter. And we instantly connected. You know, we talked about sneakers, sports, music, technology, design, everything. I was like, wow, I really get along with this guy. And the following semester,

we became roommates and, you know, moved in together in the dorms. And we'd always talked about starting the business together at some point. You know, it just kind of happened that way. And then before you knew it, you know, the following year was this 24th, 2014, we decided to start, we started a design agency. And the purpose of that agency was to help, was kind of this call to action to help other people, you know, build products and services that really have the user experience in the U.S. that, you know,

we all kind of know and love and deserve today. So we were doing websites, mobile apps, random design work, social media stuff, really whatever we could get our, we could get our hands on at that point. And then, you know, kind of skipping, skipping around, skipping some detail here. year. You know, we sucked at marketing in the traditional sense. So what we would do to get,

to get clients is we're really good at screwing around on the internet. We were pros at getting people to either love us or hate us. And so what we would do from time to time is we would build these products and we'd put them out and people would find them and people would go, oh, what is that thing? And then it would be a referral business back to us. We built a couple controversial things. I won't say them on camera because I'm still saying behind the scenes on them, but I'm sure everybody has probably touched or used one of them at some point. But one of those products ended up being yak. And so what's important about this story too is, you know, again, we lived in Jacksonville, Florida at the time. That is not the startup capital of the world

in case anybody isn't aware. In fact, at the time, we had literally zero connections into like tech, startups, venture capital, that whole world. I mean, it was just so foreign and far away from us. And I think at the time, we're about thinking, like, man, it'd be really cool to be one of those people one day. And it just felt so unattainable. But we launched Yak, you know, shortly after we, after we graduated, the agency had been going for a little bit.

And that one is the one that, for whatever reason, it just went different. We launched it and within two weeks, I kid you not, with a wait list of about 3,000, teams from companies that you dream of. Uber, Lyft, Spotify, CVS, Barstall, Sports. I mean, you think of the company, they're probably on that list. And we're going, whoa, like, okay, I think there's something here with this one. Meanwhile, our agency is still going full tilt. So like, okay, well, you know what?

Like, we're going to actually continue to maintain yak for a little bit and we'll just, you know, see what happens. So, you know, a few months go by, again, just maintaining yak trying to just keep it up for people. And then this is where our lives completely changed. I'll never forget the day where I was what I was doing. We were out at CES in Las Vegas and we were sitting in our hotel room. We were staying off-strip. At the time, we had no money.

We were completely broken. We weren't going out or anything like that. So we're sitting in our hotel room. And on Twitter, one of the users of Yak mentions VC Titan Adam Draper on Twitter. It says, hey, check out the yak guys. I think you would find interest in what they're doing. And for those listening to watching who don't know, Adam Draper, I mean, Silicon Valley wouldn't exist with the Draper family.

We're talking Skype, hotmail, Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, all these OG companies, the Draper family is responsible for. And Adam is the one who also originally invested in Coinbase. So we went from nothing to literally one of the biggest VCs in the world. You know, he's at least, okay, he's like in the conversation now. You know, 10 minutes go by, he goes, guys, this is awesome. Here's my cell phone number. Call me right now. And we're like little kids on Christmas at this point.

You know, we're going, okay, wait a minute. Like, get serious, like, focus up. We've never talked with a VC before, never talked with an investor. And here, one of the biggest guys in the world just sent us this personal cell phone number. It's telling us to call him right now. And, you know, we don't know what to expect. So we hop on the phone with Adam. And it's just great.

Like, his energy, he's matching our energy. We're just flowing, talking ideas and all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah. And at the end, he goes, all right, guys, well, I'm in. And we go, well, we're going. well, what do you mean? Like, we've never done this dance of VC before. Like, what do you mean? He goes, oh, like, I'm in.

Like, I'm going to invest. And we're going, okay, yeah, sure. Because, like, at this time, Yakw was just a shy project. You know, there was no website. It wasn't even a real company at the point. Like, it was just a thing that we built that we put out into the world.

So we're like, yeah, sure, okay. Like, yeah, we get you all the information. And then we hang up the phone. And of course, the second the phone hangs up. We're like, dude, yeah. Now, come on, let's go. He's more money than any of us could comprehend and have ever seen in our lifetime. And it was, the investment was for $250,000.

So it was more money than we could even just comprehend. So, you know, in the coming weeks, we found the lawyers called as many people as we could, figure out how to like form it into a C-corp, you know, put the company together, how to like take on investment, do all the, do all the things. And he ended up investing in our pre-seed round. And then he brought on BetoWorks Ventures. In BetoWorks, they were the ones who originally invested like Giffy. You used the gifts on your keyboard.

BetoWorks was the ones who helped Giffy take off. They also did some deals in Kickstarter, Gimlet Media, some other, their big invest, I think the biggest investors in Hugging Face, which is crazy, you know, relevant now. So anyway, they ended up doing a pre-C deal for us, and then we just haven't looked back since. So that's kind of our story and how it started in college. So you started Jack as one of the first. your side projects in college. And he saw it on Twitter at the time.

Yep. And liked the idea and got in. Yeah. How did you even know what percentage of the company he would get? So that's the thing. We were literally Googling and trying to figure out like, like there's clearly so much here that we don't know. So we would spend a ton of time Googling, calling up people, doing whatever we could

to figure out like, okay, you know, logistically. how do all this stuff work? Because if you've never raised VC funding before, put together like a startup like that, it is the most overwhelming thing in the world. Now I feel like I'm a pro and I look back at Old Jordan. I'm like, yeah, I can do that in my sleep now. But at the time, you know, there was a lot that was going into it.

So we were just consulting whoever we could. So he's still on board? Oh, yeah. We still talk to him all the time. We had a meeting with him just earlier today. And he's just a, what's so cool about Adam. I got to give Adam a lot of love. What's so cool about him is he obviously invested in a lot of companies.

But he gives so much energy and so much attention and passion into each and every startup. I'm like, man, I don't even know how you have the time for that. But yeah, he's fantastic. And shout out to Adam. Shout out to the whole Boost VC team. I got a lot of love for them. Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about what Yak is.

What's so cool about it that would attract someone of Adam's reputation in nature to be all over it? Yeah, well, at the time, if, you know, everybody sort of remembers this was 2018. when we got in contact with him. 2018? Yeah, I think so. So this was pre-COVID, pre-remote work era really being relevant. But at the time, what was really becoming, starting to become really relevant is all these audio products.

So like the idea of communication, like voice communication, AI recording, the clubhouse was popping up at the time. So like it was becoming interesting to people, which I think is what got him sort of going on it. And then, you know, for us as a company, I think what sent us just, uh, kind of, you know, kind of like through the roof is, so Adam invested, and then we had to actually build up the product of the team for like a year and some change.

And if you remember what was happening, March 13th, 2020, the whole world went upside down, and everybody decided to look for a remote work, kind of enabled tools at once. So we went from this like thing that was kind of chugging along. And if you look at analytics, you know, just skyrocketed through the roof on that date. And so I think that, you know,

he just kind of had that foresight to go, like, okay, audio has become an interesting remote work at some point. He didn't know that, you know, COVID was going to happen. I don't think it could be, but he could have predicted that. But he knew like, okay, all this is going to kind of come to, you know, the same thing at some point of time. You know, I'm going to make a bet on it. And that's what he did with us. And so just basic summary of yak is you record conversations. Yeah.

So the initial, like the, it's gone through a couple of different. But the initial version of it was just record conversations and then basically send them back and forth with some added features and doing a bad job of describing V1. But send them back and forth while you're like working remotely. Now we have applied it to real life as well because what we realized is well now everybody's back in office. Everybody's back to doing in person things like this. It's wonderful. And the best conversations in person aren't recorded. You can have a life changing conversation in person and you will never be able to revisit it ever again.

And so the underlying technology is still the same in the product. But now our focus is actually people who are attending trade shows and conferences, which has been a lot of fun. I can talk all day about it. But what's so great about that is you're at a trade trail or your conference, you're talking to hundreds of people per day. It's really hard to remember who you talk to and what the hell you actually talked about with all those people.

So that's kind of the application of it today. Okay. So that's kind of the beachhead or the niche. Yeah, exactly. So it's the one you found that's the most useful. Yeah, and it's been a blast to work on so far. Huh. Yeah.

So instead of talking to 400 people in a week and then getting back to the office and trying to sort it all out, and most of the time, in my experience, people don't sort it out very well. Yeah. That's damn true. I mean, you just, when you're talking to someone at a trade show, you're like, oh, I like this guy, Jordan. And I've got his card here that says follow up about so-and-so. And then a week later, I'm like, Jordan, Jordan. Exactly.

was Jordan, you know. Exactly the problem we're solving for it. Well, good. That's very cool. And so how do you get recorded on your phone? Yeah, it's just a mobile app on the phone. We do have a companion app that you can use on Mac right now. So if you want to leg your laptop around, we do have an app on Mac as well. So what would you say to me if I was coming into your booth and you wanted to record me?

Would you tell me? So the thing is, it really just depends on who you are and kind of what your preferences. So what's great about conferences and trade shows as well is when you buy a ticket through the show, you're opting into their terms of service that say, hey, you're going to be recorded, there's going to be microphones in your face, cameras, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, a lot of these shows actually encourage you to record as well. And then generally speaking, I think most people expect to be recorded to when they intend these things. So for example, like for us, we just came back from South by Southwest and we had a booth.

We didn't say that we were recording and there was no problem about that nobody felt weird about it. Just has your phone in your pocket? Yeah, this little like jacket pocket right here, just put it right there. God, it's great. But I guess you could also use a lapel recorder or something. Yeah, so there's a, you know, people are so creative. It's really cool. I think that's what's so great about building your own product too.

You see the creative ways people, you know, kind of, you know, adapted to what they're doing. So like some people have done like the little lapel thing. Some people put it in their jacket pocket. Some people put it in their pants pocket. Some people just put it on the table just like this. One woman, she's got the little lanyard. She's got her phone down in that. So there's a couple different ways that you can use it.

And the technology is good enough where it'll pick it up as long as it's been in a few, at you. Yeah, so you get back from the conference and you can look at or hear the conversations and then figure out what you've got to do for each one of them. Yeah, exactly. And what's so cool about it too is we connect with your CRM as well. So Salesforce is a major investor in us, or Slack now Salesforce is a major investor in us. And so we have these CRM integrations as well. So we automatically port all those conversations to your CRM as well. So that way you're already organized. And then kind of the last sauce on top of the, of it is we can also do the follow-up on your behalf as well.

It's so cool. Yeah. Well, promise me if Adam's coming in Greenville, let me know, because we'd like to have him come speak or have a dinner with him or something with the entrepreneurs here. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. When people like that come to town, we won't make them work too much, but at least a dinner.

Yeah. Adam's always down for a good dinner, I know, so 100%. Okay. Well, I'll tell you another story about Jordan is, I was looking for, I'm working on an AI project myself, and I couldn't find anyone to help me. So I went out on Facebook and put it out there in LinkedIn and said, hey, does anybody know an AI expert I could, you know, talk to or hire, you know, for a few hours to help me with something? And some guy that I know, not real well, but I know him a little bit,

he responded back and said, you ought to talk to my friend, Jordan. He's an expert at AI. He just moved to town. So I immediately called Jordan and I said, this is what I want to do. He goes, I can do that. It takes me a couple hours. I can do it. A couple hours.

I've been working on this for weeks. Yeah, I'll do it a couple hours. I said, well, how much would that cost me? And he goes, well, you know, so much an hour. Just pay me half now, half, whatever. So within seconds of talking to Jordan, I'm Venmoing him money. So here I am trying to be the sales coach. I mean, and, and of course, you know,

we met and liked each other, and you delivered. Yeah. Delivered immediately. It only took you an hour. We did it while we were sitting there. Yeah. Which is really cool. But I wanted to ask you, that's a long setup for saying that, you know, Jordan is very good at sales.

He's also good at other things, technically. But specifically, have you had any sales training? Not any formal sales training. You know, advisors and you hear stuff from like our investors and stuff like that. But I've never gone through like formal. sales training. I've never had a formal sales job. Okay. Very good. And it seems to me that you're getting a lot of your new leads and business from Twitter or X. Is that right? Yeah, we, I can talk about Twitter at X.com now all day long, but yeah, whether, you know, we've raised $12 million of

the company, like $6 million of it. I can attribute to X.com or Twitter. And then from a lead generation perspective, yeah, we get a lot off Twitter, which is crazy. So, so, Let's talk about that because most of us, me is particularly, I've got an X account, but only a few hundred followers. Most of my followers are on LinkedIn. It's kind of an old, I've got old fashioned social media. How do you, how have you gotten so many, I mean, how many followers do you have? I think I still have a few, only a few compared to some of my friends, but I think I have like $4,000, $3,000 somewhere in there. And then how would you go from?

from just having those people in there to getting someone to invest. Oh, man. You guys are ready for the secret playbook that I, that I run. It has changed my life. So the first thing that I want to say is like it's possible for anybody because pre all this, again, I had no network. I was the biggest anti-Twitter person in the world. I had like 10 followers. I hated that shit.

I never used that. I was like, nobody uses this crap. The waste of time. Exactly. I was like, oh, no, Instagram where it's at is where it's at. No, I was a, I was a hater. I'm not going to, sorry, you want, I was a hater. So what I realized, though, is for tech people in particular,

there's a corner of the internet on Twitter called Tech Twitter. I'm so stupid, but it's a thing. It exists. In Tech Twitter, there's just people who work at all the big, you know, companies, startups, investors, whatever. They're all online. They're all there. And what I realized is that's a place where all of them talk like normal humans.

So, like, so for example, on LinkedIn, it's all like a very businessy. It's only business oriented. In email, their emails just, you know, get blown up to shit. So it's, like, really hard to reach them there. But I realized on Twitter, like, they're talking about, like, their kids, basketball games, who's hanging out, just like random life stuff. And I went, you know what? Like, these people are just like you and I. Like, they have hobbies and just regular interests too.

Like, yeah, they're an investor or they're a big startup founder. But, like, they're just normal people like us as well. And so what I did is, it's like, you know what? like there's no reason I can't at least start like talking to these people like worst case scenario is like I'm no better off than where I am now like zero following and nobody's talking to me so I just started responding to people like on on feed and I just started giving my opinion I was like hey like I think this is interesting maybe try this or like have you seen this thing and just started providing value and then that got me to like my first few hundred followers

and the thing that's important here is like don't underestimate like the volume needed to like get that initial traction going and then beyond that when it went when it was time to raise, again, we didn't really know what we were doing and like we were kind of having an unsuccessful raise when we're trying to do the next round. But I realized like our strategy was just wrong. Like it wasn't a, I don't think it was a pitch or a product problem. It was just like the strategy was bad. And so this is this is the real alpha. So start taking your notes. So what I did is I found all the investors. I made a list of all the investors that I think would be good candidates to invest in us. Followed them all on Twitter.

And then I found out what they were all into, like personally. Not like work stuff, just like what are they personally into? And so the guy who ended up leading in our seed round, I found out that he was a Virginia Tech football fan. What do I know about Virginia Tech football? Nothing, but I became an expert. The only thing I knew, the only thing I knew is one of my, I wouldn't even call him a friend, acquaintances from another school across town, happened to go play football. Virginia Tech. But like I would not, you know, call his friends necessarily. So I messaged him. I was like, hey man, you're a Virginia Tech football fan. No way do you know, you know, so and so.

He goes, oh yeah, like he's great for us for whatever. For two weeks we talked about Virginia Tech football. No work, no yak, no nothing. Two weeks we talked about Virginia Tech football. And then finally he goes, hey, so like what's this thing you're working on? It looks pretty interesting. I said, I got him. So then we ended up hopping on a call, right? Did kind of a vetting call he flew down or flew out he's from Texas flew out to you know kind of meet us did some around a top golf in person and you know flew back and then he ended up investing and that's the strategy that I did for a couple other people I said hey you know this podcast that you got going on that's so interesting I love sneakers too and I just ran that same playbook for lots of people

and you know from an investment perspective that did really really well for us and then when we were trying to scale a yak up what I did there's a couple automation tools out there that I used to kind of do this, but I would just send, you know, a lot of DMs per day using automation. It would just be a really simple message. It would look like I sent it. It would just say, hey, do you mind giving me feedback on this product? Just really simple, just like that. Everybody wants to give feedback.

Everybody wants to give their opinion. And that landed us of our biggest customers, to be honest. So you used a tool to send out a simple message every day with a different theme, and you're asking for feedback or something. Yeah. And people would eventually follow you back for doing that. Yeah. And they're like, oh, wow, this is actually like pretty interesting.

Like this ended up, yeah, like it became interesting for people. Yeah. I guess not too different than if you meet somebody for the first time, you know, you want to have coffee a couple of times before you like, yeah, let's go to dinner or something, you know. It's like, it's going to just. That's exactly what I thought too because I was like, when we're thinking about our raising strategy, It's like, well, like, just immediately talking about work, like, they get bombarded with that.

Like, you know, of course, it's never going to work. I kind of have that moment. I was like, it's never going to work. So it's like, exactly to what you said, I'm like, how do people operate in real life? Like, if I just met anybody in this room, I wouldn't be like, hey, nice to meet you, want to invest in my company. You know, nobody operates like that. It's like, oh, well, what's your background? Where are you from?

Like, there's some sort of dialogue that happens beforehand. And when you apply that same sort of mindset to online, yeah, it's amazing. And the chat GPT or Rock or any of those, do you favor one versus the other? I'm really big into the GPT or chat GPT, but I also really like the, I mean, that's how we met all the custom GPs and the actions that you can create on that. Like I love the GPTs. I love Zapier. I love all the automation and kind of stuff that you can build with them. That's crazy cool.

And then for what it's worth through, Sam Altman is an investor. my friend's company. I'm a little biased. But yeah, I think I think GPT is just what they're doing is just so unbelievably cool. It is cool. I love it. I love it. So Jordan, what's your favorite book? What's my favorite book? Oh man, that's a tough one. There's like three offhand that are really good. I mean, I don't know, maybe I get shit for this, but it's like the classic startup answer. zero to one. I love zero to one. I love zero to one. I love zero to one. It just got so, I still even reread it to this day. There's just so many good principles in there for getting up the ground, getting going, you know, figuring out what to focus on, what's actually important,

what's not important. Yeah, it's a great reading. Peter Thiel. Yep. Yeah. He's, to think, to all the people he kind of brought into the. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, that whole crew is just stacked. I mean, you got Keith, you got David. I mean, Elon, like, everybody is legit. Crazy. Yeah. I read, some interview he was doing where they were saying, how did you, how are you able to pick those people?

Yeah. And he said, one of the questions he would ask them and make them answer is kind of where they saw themselves eventually. And anyone who didn't see themselves as king of the universe didn't get in. You know? That's awesome. He didn't want to average people. Yeah, yeah. And you can imagine what Elon said.

Like at age 21, he's, of course, I'll end up with five companies and I'm going to go to Mars and going to save the world and just things like that. Yeah, very casual. Yeah, no big deal. No big deal. How about favorite band? Favorite band? Oh, man. I do love the Eagles.

Wow. That's a good one. Who else am I listening to? Believe it or not, I like Ridge Against the Machine. Okay. Yeah, I've been listening to a lot of the Eagles, though, lately. Eagles is a good, good groove in music. Yeah.

And favorite word? My favorite word. That's a real, I've never been asked that question. Yeah, I've got to think about that one. Let me come back to you on that one, but I can tell you my least favorite word, everybody out there, is sure. I hate the word sure with every fiber of my being. I'm not going to say it.

If you scroll back through my Twitter or my LinkedIn, you can see, I have so many posts about it. I was like, it was the laziest, worst word ever should be deleted from the dictionary. I'm super passionate about it. One day I'm going to try to actually get it removed. It's so lazy. It happened to me the other day. I asked someone, I said, could we move this thing to 930 or whatever? And I got the sure.

And it's like, well, do you want to or no? It's almost like a slap in the face, too. That's the way I take it. Yeah, sure, sure. I can't stand it. It's so lazy, so not. I'll give you, here's your favorite word, yak. Yeah, yeah.

Yack.com, yeah. You paid a lot for that word, so I guess it's my favorite. It's a short word, that's right. And then in terms of promoting things, I mean, promoting Yak, you would be looking for what's your ideal prospect and how could they find you? Yeah, so if you're a person who goes to a lot of trade shows or conferences, I would love to talk to you. Or likewise, if you are someone who actually host a conference or trade show, if you

anybody who does one of those, I'd also love to talk to you. Best way to find us is just going to the website. Yak.com spelled how it sounds. I'm also on Twitter at Jordan L. Walker, and I'm also on LinkedIn. I'm actually trying to ramp up my LinkedIn. Okay, I'll trade with you. Yeah, yeah. So I'm trying to ramp up my LinkedIn, just Jordan L. Walker on LinkedIn as well.

Those are the best spots to get us, get at us. Yeah. Well, it's a fascinating story, and you're such a young guy to have all this stuff going on. I'd love to have you back. Yeah. Maybe, you know, six months or a year and kind of see what's transpired. Yeah, I was going to say, I can't wait to see what we, you know, how much we've accomplished in a year. So we'll definitely run in the back.

And don't be, don't be so busy you can't help me every now and then with something. You know I got you. You know I got your back. All right. Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate it. Thanks, man. Okay.